


Tremors

by theLiterator



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Eluvians, Elvhen Lore, Kirkwall (Dragon Age), Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Multi, Pride, Uthenara, Wisdom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-10-25 14:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10766460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLiterator/pseuds/theLiterator
Summary: Tremors woke him.He'd hoped to see a world improved in the time since his last awakening. What he found instead was a war, elven refugees, and a city built on blood.It turns out, the solace found in dreams is fleeting.





	Tremors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heeroluva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heeroluva/gifts).



Tremors woke him.

He didn’t think that they would have, had they merely impacted the physical realm, but he felt them in the _Fade_ , shivering through the air, as spirits and demons fled from him. He’d tried to chase them, paws slipping in the nothingness that pretends at being the ground, here, and then… bright lights, a shockwave.

Consciousness.

He gasped, because breathing the air of the world he had wrought was painful, it lingered in his chest and tried to choke him, and gasping was all he _could_ do for the moment.

Eventually, he remembered how to breathe, remembered that he _must_ breathe, and his chest stopped heaving uselessly. He opened his eyes.

He’d been sleeping in a cave, and as he looked around him, he saw the long rows of marble plinths, the slumbering bodies on them in varying states of decay. Some few, like him, were fresh, unravaged by time, and their lips glistened in the low flickering of the veilfire torches on the walls.

He licked his own lips and tasted honey, cloyingly sweet and making him want to gag.

“And at last, the Dreamer awakes,” an unfamiliar voice called out in familiar cadence.

“So it seems,” he said. “Was I dreaming?”

“Well, you certainly were not awake,” the voice replied, chuckling lowly. _She_ walked into the flickering light of the veilfire, and he almost wept for it.

“Mythal,” he said reverently.

“Perhaps,” she replied. “But only if you are Fen’harel.”

“Are any of us what we once were?” he gestured around himself, at the dead and the dying dreamers. Would that he could kill them all, but there was magic here, still, where there shouldn’t be, and he was afraid, so helplessly afraid, to disturb it.

This was not the first time he had awoken, and while he willed it to be the last, he did not think it would be.

“What woke me?”

He asked her only because he had no one else to ask, and she shook her head a little bit and did not answer. “We must leave here.”

“The…” Were they others like him? He did not think so. There were no others like him, really, not even she who spoke like Mythal.

 _You are alone_ , his subconscious whispered to him. “What of the rest of the Dreamers?” he asked finally.

“They are long dead,” she replied, flicking her fingers dismissively. She had been less forgiving than even he, he remembered. Mythal of vengeance, total and sure.

But vengeance was the strongest of spirits, a fusing of Hunger and Justice.

Only Compassion might defeat her, now.

 _ **You** could,_ came an irreverent thought, and he shook his head, rubbing his forehead to be free of it.

“We must leave here,” she repeated, and he nodded, let her take his hand. He would go with her, for now, he thought, until he had someplace better to be.

***

“The city is burning,” he observed as they descended from the mountain cave he’d been sheltered in. The remnants of a campsite, oddly familiar in a strange way, surrounded them like scattered toys, and he wondered…

He did _not_ wonder, because interfering in the lives of those beneath him was what had brought about his current fate, years and years of dreaming interspersed with a decade or two of hardscrabble existence in the world he had wrought for them all… it was a curious sort of limbo, and not one he would extend by _wondering_.

“Yes. They do tend to do that, when someone sets them on fire."

Solas snorted. “And I don’t suppose the fire has anything to do with why _you’re_ here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, old friend. I’m here for _you_.” He stopped short on the pathway, and eventually she stopped too. “You try my patience at the best of times, Fen’harel.”

“I… I have gone along with you against my best judgement many times,” he said. “But to believe that you planned… _this_?”

“Oh, no, even I cannot plan things so perfectly as that. The city is burning, the world is burning--none of it is my doing. Or perhaps all of it is, but if it had been _planned_ , Dreamer, then the timing would have been a lot better. I have yet to solidify several key parts of what is to come, and you waking here and now was only predictable once everything had been set in motion.”

Solas moved forward again, and she kept pace at his side, gesturing again at the burning city. “I have one of those parts here, and she should never have stayed.”

“One of your daughters?” he asked.

She laughed. “Oh, no, I only have one this lifetime, and she is enough daughter for ten of me. One hundred! No. You’ll like this one. Proud and refusing to see it, she’s particularly attuned to the divide between worlds.”

The guilt welled up in him anew, but he did not stop again.

As darkness fell across the city, the fires burned themselves out, so that by the time they made it to the imposing city walls all that remained was rubble, ash, and the scent of blood and magic thicker than smoke on the air.

“I leave you here, safe enough for now,” Mythal said, and then she was gone, as was her way, so Solas picked his own way across the ruined street and turned a corner into what had to have been an Alienage before the destruction had reached it.

“Quickly now, if you can walk, I need you to collect a blanket and your share of the jerky and move to one of the houses. Someone will direct you to an empty one. We won’t have any of us go hungry or cold tonight, all right then?” a woman’s high, clear voice carried over the rumblings of a city in turmoil, and he didn’t have to see the mark of Mythal in blood on her face to know that this was the person whose keeping his friend had given him into.

She had magic, he thought, and a lot, powerful and deep like the forests he had run in as a child, before he had forsaken his name and his life for the way of the wolves, tinged copper with blood and remorse and under all of that…

She stood straight and proud as she handed out blankets and dried meat, and she offered him one of each. He took both, numb, before shaking his head.

“I was sent,” he said, and did not know how to finish that sentence. He wondered what name Mythal, Flemeth, Wisdom corrupted by flesh and longevity, had given her.

She paused, green eyes catching his, and said, softly, “I know you,” with a hint of awe in her tone that made him want to rub his cheeks and duck his head.

He stood the straighter for the impulse.

“Unlikely,” he replied.

“Asha’bellanar showed us to your cave. Are the Dreamers waking?” The last asked in crude, butchered Elvhen, and he shuddered at that.

“Just me,” he said, regretful, wanting to lie to her but not, at the same time, wanting to lie to someone who belonged to Mythal. 

_Wasn’t this supposed to free them?_ he thought bitterly. And here was a bright mage with a blood claim on her face and Mythal’s orders on her mind, and she might have been the best of them but she was still…

 _You never trusted them, and they killed her, and you were **right**_. “Enough!” he snapped, and then his hands flew to his head, his staff clattering to the ground. The sound of his distress died on his lips only because of his self-control, he knew.

“Oh dear,” the woman said, bending to collect his staff.

“I could have gotten that,” he replied, quietly horrified by his lapse.

“Oh, it’s not a problem,” she replied. “It makes sense, you know, if you’ve been asleep since Arlathan.”

“I have not,” he told her. “I have been asleep… only an age or two. If you’ll tell me the year, I can--”

“It’s 9:37. The humans call it the Dragon Age,” she said. “But let me show you my house. You can rest there. Remember where your little toe is and what hands are for and so on. Hundreds of years in the fade, I’m surprised you’re walking at all!”

He blinked at her, and she guided him bodily over to her house and grinned as he obligingly went inside.

***

He slept fitfully, that close to the warped, tattered bits of his Veil in the heart of this city; he could see it now, fresh in the dreams of thousands, the magic that had woken him. He remembered weapons such as this one, weapons that had held the precursor to worse things, worse wars.

He’d seen weapons twisted up of magic and of nature used on many fronts, had seen far too many innocents and slaves dead against their onslaught, and he woke time and time again.

He dreamt, at last, of a gold dragon, large enough to intimidate even him in the guise of the wolf he’d been named for, and the dragon led him through the streets of the city he’d slept so near for so long.

“Do you see it?” the dragon asked, wending through streets that shifted around him, dizzying in the aftermath of disaster upon disaster.

“I see only blood,” Solas replied, even though he knew better than to reply to a spirit whose identity he didn’t know. “The dream is too shallow, all I see is what woke me.”

The dragon shook its great head and bit him, hard, under his jaw, making him yelp with pain and jump back a pace. “No,” it said. “No.”

He willed it to shift so he could know it.

It laughed at him.

“Look around you. What dream is this? You who created dreaming, surely _you_ can see.”

“I see… Qunari?” he said, squinting. Riddles. Riddles meant… Pride or Wisdom.

His eternal punishment: pride or wisdom?

“Qunari,” the dragon replied. “And templars. Mages, men. And look deeper?”

“Orlesians,” Solas muttered, following the shifting streets, even though his fur was soaked with the seeming of blood. “Tevinter? And…”

Blood, so much blood, and he woke up drowning and gasping for breath.

“Who is that?” a male voice demanded, sounding upset, horrified.

“He came to me from our people,” the woman-slave replied. “You’d do well to show him respect.”

“I will if he shows self control,” the man snapped.

A sigh.

“Why did you come here, Fenris?”

Silence, the soft sounds of a fire burning, and another sigh.

“Where else am I to go?” he asked.

“Oh, Fenris,” the woman said. “Wherever you’d like?”

“So certain, Merrill?” and they must be old friends, to tease with that much malice, Solas thought. He was reminded-- he would not dwell on memories, not in waking.

“You know you’d be welcome here. You have always been welcome here.”

Solas sat up, because intimate exchanges did not deserve his eavesdropping, and because he did not like not knowing.

“I never learned your name,” he said into the silence that greeted him.

“Merrill,” she replied. “Keeper of Clan Sabrae.”

“Keeper?” Fenris asked, sounding amused.

“Well, there’s no one else, is there?” she replied, defensive.

“You would know,” he said.

“These people-- we’re leaving Kirkwall. They need someone to look to, don’t they? And no one else wants them, so I’ll take them.”

“Kirkwall,” Solas said, tasting the name. It both fit and did not fit the dreams he’d had, and he wondered why it mattered so much.

“Yes,” Merrill said. “That’s what it’s called now. The Tevinter Imperium called it--”

“Emeritus,” Fenris interrupted, scowling, something lighting his skin from within, his anger flavored with the blood of Titans.

Solas breathed out.

They had… they had not learned a thing, had they? Had it all been for nothing? _You know the answer to that already,_ his subconscious whispered. _Look at the city around you_.

He shivered.

“You’re cold!” Merrill said, leaping to her feet and dashing off.

“Who are you?” Fenris asked.

“I will tell you if you tell me who gave you that name,” Solas said, knowing he sounded… more himself than he should, but… _Fenris_.

The elf stared at him for a long time, long enough that Merrill had come back and started apologizing for not having enough blankets before Fenris interrupted her handwringing. “My former master gave it to me,” he said on a snarl.

Solas’s gut twisted. “Former?” he inquired as evenly as he could. _All for nought_.

“I ripped his heart out and watched him die,” Fenris said, dripping smug self-satisfaction and _pride_.

Solas grinned at him, sharp and canine. “Good,” he said and Merrill was looking between them, smiling faintly and holding a bit of muslin.

“It’s cheese,” she said. “You didn’t eat earlier and I’ve run out of dried meat. We’ll need to hunt along the way,” she added, musing. “I wonder how many of the hunters will leave tonight and try to make it to another clan on their own?”

“The ones who remain will remain,” Fenris said. “I’m going to sleep.” His armor clanked heavily as he found a corner to settle in.

“Eat,” Merrill told him. “I have something to take care of, but call for me if you need anything.”

***

He found Merrill by accident, looking for the way outside, and he rather thought maybe it was Mythal’s all-important ‘fate’ that had twisted up his sense of direction or his memory of the night before so that he’d gone through the wrong door and found…

“You have an Eluvian,” he whispered, awed.

“It’s broken,” she said.

“It’s dormant,” Solas replied, stepping forward, touching the frame. “It just needs… the right catalyst, you could say.”

“Do you remember how to work it?” she asked, and her fingers curled around his arm, wrapping tight and making him want to lean into her, comfort her.

He remembered this: the warmth of a woman, the softness of her laugh. Magic mingling and warming them both, and he turned to her--

And all he could see of her was the Vallaslin, marring her beauty with the chains of those long lost. _Your fate is loneliness._

“I don’t need to,” he said. “I need… to sleep again.”

“It’s not safe here.”

“Only for an hour or two, da’len,” he replied, smiling indulgently at her. She was not someone to be loved. She was someone to be rescued, to be tempered and sent out to free others.

She was a slave, and he was Fen’harel.

“Oh!” she said, blushing. “Right! I knew what you meant.” Her laugh was warm and gentle like the rest of her and he knew why Mythal had sent him to her, but he wouldn’t be caught so easily.

***

The gold dragon was waiting for him.

“Did you know there was an eluvian here?”

The dragon laughed, tossing its head back and showing rows upon rows of teeth. It wasn’t impressive: Fen’harel had teeth too. He snapped, and the dragon slipped away, shifted into shadows, into the shadow of a man.

His nails glittered with gold lacquer, and Solas could see glimpses of amber eyes, of bronze hair.

He wondered why he knew this form, wondered…

“My little wolf,” the shadow murmurs. “You must look _deeper_.”

Solas snarled at the name, only his face was that of an elven man’s and not a wolf’s; his hair was long and braided in elaborate styling, and he was a slave again.

His face bore a gentle, obedient smile, and he would scream, but the man with his golden shadows took his wrist and drew him along, down a river of blood or a cobbled street.

“The eluvian,” he managed to protest. “I…”

“First, answer me this: what will an exotic little pet like you do with such a fancy artifact as that?”

The river deepened until it was over their heads, and he realized, slowly, like swimming in blood, that he could not control this dream.

He sucked in a breath of blood, and exhaled air inside a familiar church.

The walls were crystal, held up only by the thinnest arches of stone and magic, and slaves sang together in an ethereal sound that filled the halls with pure beauty.

He had been here before.

“What will you do?” the man of gilt shadows asked.

“Oh,” Solas whispered. “I know this city.”

Daern’thal smiled.

***

Need.

The catalyst was need. He could sense it even before he fully woke, and it disoriented him briefly, so he wasn’t sure where he was or when, but the rough wooden slats of the floor registered and then too did the glow of the eluvian, and he sat up with a wordless cry of triumph.

Merrill woke at that, mumbling sleepily, and Fenris bolted into the room, sword drawn and … glowing. Solas stared.

Merrill broke the silence with a giggle. “Fenris, he’s fine. Just a bit of a dream.”

“Your mirror is working,” Fenris replied, sheathing his sword.

“So it is,” Solas replied, not really with them any longer. He stood up, brushed his fingertips against the surface.

“No!” Merrill cried, yanking him back bodily. “You can’t _touch_ it, it--it had the Blight. It was tainted with the Darkspawn magic. It might still be dangerous.”

“If you really believed that, Keeper Merrill,” he whispered, “Would you have brought it here?”

She blinked, opened her mouth to reply, and then shut it again.

“If you’re going to touch it, I’m going to touch it.”

Fenris made a noise of disgust. 

“What?” Merrill said, whirling on him. “It’s not like _you_ know anything about it!”

“I know Isabela will murder me if I stand idly by and watch you injure yourself.”

“Well, you know where the door is,” she replied, gesturing.

Fenris crossed his arms over his chest and scowled.

“I’m not going to touch it, but it isn’t Blighted.”

_Darkspawn in the Crossroads? My, my. You’ve certainly exceeded even your own expectations, haven’t you?_

“You were,” Merrill said. “It was.”

“It’s a doorway, da’len,” Solas replied gently. “I can show you; though if you’re correct, there _may_ be darkspawn on the other side.”

His throat went tight with dread at the thought. All the knowledge, his underground routes, his people’s safety-- only his people weren’t safe, were they?

Still. Darkspawn in the Crossroads?

He shut his eyes.

“Fine,” Fenris said. “But we’re going to find food first.”

“What?” Merrill asked. “Why?”

Solas felt sure that Fenris would not answer, because _he_ would not have answered, but then Fenris said, softly enough that Solas felt guilty for hearing it: “Hawke is gone. Hawke _left_.”

“Oh, Fenris,” Merrill replied in the same tone. “Let's go find food, then. If we can.”

***

They couldn’t. There was no food in the city, and so Fenris insisted on going out to hunt. They would need to feed the other elves in the Alienage regardless of what happened in the Crossroads with his self-appointed companion and her protector, so he went along with them, and he could feel the ties that had kept him chained up to the earth long after every person he’d ever known had crumbled to dust ( _Or been locked away, little wolf?_ ) starting to choke im again.

The mountains cut a sharp, familiar shape into the sky, and Solas wondered how he had not recognized them sooner.

“The humans call them the Vinmark Mountains,” Merrill said conversationally as they wandered along. She had strapped her staff across her back and carried a short hunting bow. He’d traded his own for a sling, because he knew he didn’t have the strength, yet, to draw a bowstring.

Fenris had only his hands and his lyrium and his gauntlets, but Solas did not doubt that for him, it was exactly enough.

“What do the People call them?” Solas asked.

Fenris snorted.

“Well, we don't know anymore. But that's my job now, isn't it?” Merrill said, eternally cheerful.

“So you say,” Fenris muttered.

He stalked ahead, quieter here on the wooded coast than he had been in Merrill’s house in the city.

“He's hurt,” she said softly, and when he turned to her and saw the raw pain on her face underneath the vallaslin, he thought she was saying it for her own sake rather than his. “I can't blame him, really.”

“Speaking from experience,” Solas said. “No matter what pain or hardship there is in one’s past, the fault of one’s present actions lie entirely within oneself.”

Merrill looked at him and smiled a little. “What fault could _you_ carry?”

He laughed softly and took her hand.

Mythal had given her to him for this, he thought, a lost slave-Keeper with a clan of city elves and faltering hope and nothing else.

He showed her her magic the way he felt it, green and glowing and warm with life, and then he _twisted_ , giving her the magic of his own past, the magic that was now the Fade, and she gasped.

“Were you a Keeper, before?”

 _Laughter_.

“I was a criminal, before,” he told her.

“Oh,” she whispered. “Well you aren't now, are you, Dreamer?”

***

Daern’thal was more gold than shadows when Solas dreamed on the Wounded Coast.

The camp appeared around him, exactly the same, and Solas watched as Daern’thal checked first Fenris’s slumbering form, then Merrill’s, before he sat beside the fire and smiled at Solas.

“You remember me,” he said.

“I cannot forget you,” Solas replied.

“So many have, though. Are you going to undo it then?”

“Can you see any of the waking world?” Solas asked. “Can you see _them_?”

“I warned you,” Daern’thal said. “You ask a warrior to solve a problem, and he gives you his sword. But not all problems need to be cut asunder.”

“You’re not a warrior,” Solas said; he wasn’t. Daern’thal was magic and might and glittering gold. Daern’thal was every chain that had ever bound him, and he was the chisel that had freed him.

There was a certain wildness to him, even now, even after 8,000 years imprisonment; some shards of him could slip free, clearly. First shards of Mythal, now of Daern'thal, and what of the rest of the Evanuris? What of the _rest_?

He had made the world helpless to them, and given them millennia to plot, and now all he had was himself, body weak from uthenara, and…

Mythal’s dedicant and a lyrium-branded slave who wore Solas’s own name.

“I see you’ve grasped the intricacies,” Daern’thal said.

“You aren’t angry?”

“What’s a thousand years to an immortal? My kin and I are not those quickling men you so despise. What’s a prison to those who crafted sky and earth, forest and mountain?”

Solas shivered at the certainty in his voice.

“What is eternity to _vengeance_?” Daern’thal hissed, leaning forward. Even in the dream, his hand was brand-hot against Solas’s face.

Even in the dream, Solas flinched.

“I hate you,” Daern’thal said, and his hand slid lower, tracing brands that no longer appeared on Solas’s cheeks, tracing the tendon in his neck down to his collarbones and to his heart.

Palm flat against Solas’s chest, Daern’thal pushed.

“If even I cannot forgive you, what will you do? Where will you go? Will you protect this little harem of slaves in _Kirkwall_? Will you sit down in despair and howl as the world ends?”

“I will beat you,” Solas said, and Daern’thal caught his mouth in a kiss. “I have done it before; I will do it again.” THe words were muddled by the other’s lips, but he meant them all the same.

Daern’thal bit his lips to bleeding, dug burning fingertips into Solas’s chest, and _Fenris woke him up_.

***

“I’ve had those dreams,” Fenris said. It wasn’t gentle, exactly, because Fenris was too hurt to be gentle, as Merrill had said.

Solas smiled at him gently, to prove he _could_. “I imagine you have,” he admitted, and Fenris stared into the fire, and Solas watched the way it painted his features in gold and bronze.

***

“You do not have to come with me,” Solas told them both as they stared into the eluvian.

He _craved_ their company, though, and he would not bar the way to them: Merrill with her bright laugh and wellspring of curiosity, Fenris who had _been_ him millennia past, so wound up with the pain of his own injustices that he could not stand to see the greater injustice around him.

“I’m coming,” Merrill said. “It’s _my_ mirror, and it’s not as if Kirkwall could get any _worse_ while we’re gone.”

“And I won’t take the blame for her dying,” Fenris added. “Besides, you, at least, are tolerable company.”

Merrill smiled at Solas for that, and he couldn’t fathom why, even when she nudged him and grinned harder.

“Well, da’len. It is your mirror. Would you like to go first?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Together, so we don’t get lost on the other side.”

Her hand was small and cool in his, and he could see, out of the corner of his eye, the way Fenris stiffened when she took his too, and they plunged into silver for a heartbeat, before he was _home_.

***

“That’s Fen’harel,” Merrill said, and Solas didn’t have to look at the ruined mural to know what she was pointing at. “Is he… are those slaves?”

“He is breaking their chains,” Solas said, not a little proud of the legacy he had made for himself, even if the only things that remembered were the crumbling walls of a place that no longer quite existed.

“What?” Fenris demanded.

“It is forgotten, now, but the People were slaves, and Fen’harel made it his mission to free them.”

“So he was real, then?” Merrill asked. “A man and not a god?”

“The Evanuris wished to be seen as godly,” Solas offered. “But all were real enough. They were greedy and selfish and capricious, and they could not be killed.”

“And what of Mythal?” Merrill asked, touching the lines tattooed over her face. “What do your stories tell of Mythal?”

“She was the only one he trusted, and then her brothers betrayed her. She… died.”

And Fen’harel had given up, then, and gone to Daern’thal and promised to be his lover in exchange for the solution to a problem.

Had been given a sword and a prison instead of an actual solution, but Fen’harel had been foolish and prideful and convinced of his own righteousness, so he’d taken it.

They entered the great hall where he’d handed out so many blankets of his own, and he kicked an empty crate that had once held some poor slave’s entire world, and looked around.

“I have… need of privacy,” he said. “I’ll return shortly.”

Fenris, being there to safeguard Merrill because he had no other master to follow, did not object, and Merrill was busy at one of the shelves on the edges of the hall, pulling down a book and gasping aloud in delight at seeing written Elvhen.

The vault was as he’d left it when he’d realized what he’d done, when he’d been mad with the agony of the sundering, his mind white-hot with pain and delirious with the loss of most of his magic, all shut away on the other side of the Veil with the Evanuris and the rest of them, whoever had wound up where, and it had felt more like defeat than victory.

He’d broken a number of his own icons of power, useless in the days and weeks following the sundering, and they lay in pieces on the vault floor, exactly as he remembered them.

 _Always foolish_ , came the thought, but he brushed it aside and went to the casket he’d had made for the orb, which had been as dead as the rest of these things.

Now, though, when his fingers closed around it, he could feel the spark of magic within, calling to him, though he had not the strength to respond.

 _Yes,_ he thought, feeling something swelling within.

When he came back out, Merrill had taken the crate and filled it with the books, her expression one of guilt and stubbornness.

“What’s that?” Fenris asked.

“ _Din'Anshiral_ ,” Solas replied.

Merrill bit her lip and looked away.

“It feels like magic,” Fenris said with disgust, turning aside.

“It is,” Solas admitted. “Once I thought it meant freedom for all of our People,” he added.

“And now?”

“I don’t know if I believe such a thing is possible, Fenris.” He hesitated, rolling the orb between his hands and watching the light within, bright again with the power to sunder a world. He tossed it in the air, and Fenris caught it, the lyrium in his skin glowing in response. 

“We should move on,” Fenris said, but he held the orb gently, and not out of fear, Solas thought.

They were passing the mural again, both of his companions staring at it in hushed awe, when he said, to kindle the spark of trust between them: “My former master called me his little wolf, too.”

Twin pairs of green eyes snapped to him, but only for a moment, before dropping back to their feet; learned subservience from two very different types of slavery.

When they reached the eluvian that would send them back out into Merrill’s home, Fenris passed him back the orb, his gauntlets as warm as blood where they touched Solas’s skin. “What happened to the one who named you that?”

“I’ve had those dreams,” Solas said.

Fenris stilled, but then Merrill was stepping through the mirror and he followed, because he hadn’t yet learned how not to. 

Once, Solas would have vowed to teach him. Now, he knew he would only abuse that entrained self-enslavement, and he would send the guilt over it to rot away with the other parts of him that had once been whole and hopeful.

***

Merrill organized her people with the gentle cajoling that his own creche-mother had used on them, and it worked.

He suspected that part of the reason it worked was Fenris standing around scowling about everything, terrifying even the most lazy into listening to her.

If anyone asked him, however, he wasn’t there to help her, but to watch her; and people _did_ ask.

Solas found he could easily fade into the background in this city, simply by being one of a dozen identically grimy, hopeless elves, and while it wasn’t a forest and the comfort of fur and teeth, he did like the lack of visibility.

“Hey, Broody,” a dwarf called out, while Merrill was organizing the allotment of horses and carts that would help them leave. “Heard you were still around.”

 

Fenris looked up, but didn’t acknowledge the dwarf in any other way.

“Surprised you didn’t go with Hawke, honestly.” the dwarf continued.

Fenris pointedly ignored him, and Solas edged closer, wondering if his goal was knowledge or to protect the elf he’d already picked to marshall his forces when the time came; wondering if it mattered.

“But even all of that aside, you’re staying with Merrill? You know I can find you work, if you want it.”

“Isabela would--”

“I heard that excuse from Donnic, but you and I both know that Isabela would be the first person to point out that Merrill can damned well look after herself, what with being a _blood mage_ and all.”

“Well,” Fenris said slowly. “As I have come to learn, there _are_ things worse than blood magic in this world.”

“Oh, Fenris,” the dwarf said softly. “He left you behind, didn’t he?”

One day, Solas thought, the elf would realize he had his own choices to make.

He rather hoped it was _after_ his own goals were achieved, but still. One day.

Laughter flickered through his mind, and he shivered in the noonday sunshine.

***

“I don’t know where to take them,” Merrill admitted to him that night, huddled as they were in the room with the eluvian; she hadn’t trusted any of the refugee elves in that room, and neither had he. Fenris slept just outside, across the door, a barrier to them or for them, he wasn’t sure if Fenris even knew.

“The mountains; the wilderness has always been our home. Cities such as these were not meant for our kind, da’len,” he said, and it was true. The cities were hubs of slavery and poverty and rot, the magic siphoned up and hoarded away by those who did not deserve it.

“And where will you go?” she asked, rolling over and reaching for him with her eyes.

He shut his, shook his head, then answered. “I will use the orb, I think.”

“What does it do?”

Solas laughed, low and dark and a little crazed. “It is a sword. I intended to use it to end slavery, to keep my People from being exploited, drained for magic and treated as pets by those who knew better.”

The door opened, and Fenris slipped in with them. “That wasn’t her question,” he said, voice low and snarling. Apt. “What does it do?”

“It restores us,” Solas said, hoping it was not a lie. “It erases the quickling corruption, it ends their power over you.”

“Us,” Fenris said, and he could see it now, the comradeship that Solas had lied to engender. _We are the same_ , came the thought, and he brushed it away. They were not.

“Us,” Solas agreed. “You’ve seen it here, haven’t you? How desperate they are, how desperate we must be, to counter that.”

Fenris nodded once, firmly, and Solas allowed himself a slow, triumphant smile. “You know, don’t you, what must be done.”

“Do I?” he asked, but the lyrium in his skin reached out, singing for the blood of the Titans, yearning for a world unsundered.

“I will go with you and Keeper Merrill,” Solas said, not adding: for now.

***

It was later, and Daern’thal haunted the cusps of his dreams, long, burning touches and silken truths spoken like darts to the throat, when Fenris murmured to the woman he hated as only a friend could hate: “Do we trust him?”

“I trust that he was sent to me,” she replied.

“But who is he?”

“He… I don’t know, Fenris. I have a guess, but it is mad.”

“Even for you?” he asked.

Merrill laughed, a soft, sad laugh. “Especially for me. But if my guess is right, then he can do as he pleases, and scatter us across the world like glass if we get in his way. And if he is telling the truth about what he wants, he can do as he says.”

“End slavery,” Fenris said flatly.

Merrill laughed again. “Except that’s not what he said, was it?”

Fenris sighed and settled back. “It can’t hurt anything to take him with us,” Fenris said.

“Not any worse than _not_ taking him,” she agreed. “And he would owe us a favor. I believe he takes those seriously.”

“I don't want _favors,_ woman,” Fenris snapped.

“I know, Fenris,” she said. “But you don’t want anything, do you?”

They were quiet long enough for Daern’thal to suck him in again, and he knew no more of this world until dawn.

***

They left Kirkwall as the sun rose; a long, tired parade of elves, and not a single human noticed. They were too caught up in their own destruction.

Solas could feel the way the resentment burned through him, could feel the way it drowned out logic and reason, but he could not stop it. The low simmering rage was there, had always been there, aimed solidly at those who couldn’t bother to see that those they’d built their cities on the backs of were fleeing all at once.

He _hated_ it.

“We can’t take them onto the Wounded Coast,” Fenris said, drawing even with him. “It’s dangerous, even if we do have the hunters; the slavers will be here en force. They follow war like carrion birds.”

“Merrill will look after her people,” Solas said. “And I have some small defenses of my own.”

“Magic cannot protect you from Tevinter slavers, but you and Merrill will have me. They all will.”

Solas blinked at him. “I had thought you… wary of her. Of us-- mages.”

“You were a slave,” Fenris said, and perhaps, for him, that was enough.

The guilt wormed deeper in his gut, and he ignored it. He had plenty to feel guiltier over than one little slave in a world that should never have been, he reminded himself.


End file.
